When I select a poem to review from Image’s archives (Do online subscribers realize what a treasure trove lies at their fingertips?), I try to find a piece that connects with current events, the liturgical calendar, or the season. I also look for a piece that is accessible yet not obvious, well-crafted but not exhibitionist.…

The compelling narrative of “Lord, Sky,” set during the time of an election, is also sheer poetry. The writer repeats diction (“light,” “sky,” “moon,” “grin”) and layers language (“heaven,” “rainbow,” “stars,” “night,” “midnight”) to invite us “little trees of heaven / stuck in concrete” to pay heed to the world above and around us, to…

End times? Friends in the evangelical world talk seriously about the Rapture. Our world is in turmoil, and the social and political structures we have trusted seem to be coming undone. This is not the first time I have experienced so unsettling a change in the fabric of my universe. In my childhood, I lived…

One of a writer’s greatest challenges is to create a short piece that is in no other way “small.”  In 14 brief lines, Hailey Leithauser has succeeded in writing a poem that is simultaneously compact and expansive.   Prefacing it with Robert Bly’s line, “Some small bone in your foot is longing for heaven,” Leithauser’s…

Robert Cording’s prose poem reminds me of my late Aunt Mary, who, at roughly the same age as the poem’s narrator, chose her gravesite for the sightlines it offered—in her case, a clear view of the horizon where the sun rises and where, she believed, Jesus would return on Resurrection Day. She visited regularly, each…